i gave cyberpunk2077 another shot after hating it at launch because multiple people pestered me about it for two years. i was repeatedly told of my lengthy list of criticisms, “they fixed all that, it’s like a totally different game now”.
10 hours later it’s clear that they’re either:
a) delusional b) liars c) literally cannot hear criticism of the game being spoken aloud
because that shit was 99% identical to at launch, bugs included. the difference between the game that people keep describing to me and the game in front of me is so stark that i’m fucking baffled. it’s like it’s a cult or something.
Being a pretty significant ShadowRun fan, I have pondered if it would be possible to do basically some kind of ShadowRun-esque kind of total overhaul / stand alone campaign style mod.
You could possibly modify the core game mechanics and skill progressions / gates to make it more like ShadowRun rules than Cyberpunk Red rules, or possibly try to merge them together…
Then you could try to do some kind of fanfiction style blending of the two significantly different canons, or maybe just throw one out and go with the other, and basically have an isekai plot…
And then setup some kind of like, standalone questline that takes place in Night City (and environs).
Theoretically it shouldn’t be impossible to mod in all the uh, metahumans of ShadowRun, there are already mods for changing the player and other NPC bodies around… and the furries have already made uh, fursona/‘exotic’ humanoid mods… so… its not impossible, theoretically…
But… you’d have to invent some kind of way to direct your party members around generally and in combat, in some fashion, and also manage all their stats and skills and such.
I think that would be the hardest part, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do like, a custom npc companion mod.
Somebody is though, basicslly working on making a mod that would let you have a drone buddy, and you’d have a different kind of cyberdeck, and then command that drone around with it, so that, if it can actually work, would be a step toward that direction, as well as it basically being someone inventing the foundation for the uh Rigger class/archetype in ShadowRun.
That and… you can slow time if you can hook into the right game calls/functions, maybe you could expand that into some kind of… either you are still you, giving commands within your visual range… or, you could maybe basically mod/break photo mode, and turn that into a disembodied way to observe a whole combat space and then give commands from something more like a top down or isometric view.
Yea, but at that point you are probably pretty much better off making your own game, mods don’t usually have game expansion level scale, and those that do are usually in games much easier to mod (skyrim and fallouts have mod devs with a decade of modding experience too) and even then it takes whole teams - so why grapple with a game you don’t have the source code for?
That is entirely correct, I am also simultaneously toying around with a bunch of ideas for my own game, but they’re… a bit different.
Its certainly not impossible to make such a comprehensive total overhaul mod, many games have mods like this… but, yeah, they end up taking a decade, and there is a decent chance that that same group of people probably could have more or less made very close to the same thing, in half the time, although with different branding, if they all just learned unity or godot or something.
But two caveats to that:
It has only been fairly recent that things like unity and godot exist, not too long ago making you own halfway decent engine was a very serious roadblock, so, just mod.
Also… you absolutely can learn a lot of aspects of just general game dev if you mod fairly substantially, there is a good degrer of overlap and just general shared knowledge and skills, if you go at modding pretty seriously for a while.
Back in the day, industry used to directly hire very skilled modders.
Now… not so much.
I guess it depends on your goals, your timeframe, your commitment level, etc.
Like, in this specific thing I’ve proposed… remaking all of CP77, all of Night City, to the same fidelity… yeah good fucking luck as a small indie dev/modder or small team of them.
But, if you basically just want to make your own, maybe less dense, less detailed… some kind of hybrid of ttrpg and fps mechanics, well then sure, that could work!
But also: WolvenKit exists for CP77, those are pretty comprehensive mod tools, they seem to roughly be on par with GECK from the FO games.
Anyway, I am just spitballing the ‘ShadowPunk’ idea, personally, yeah, I’d rather grind at my own indie game that I could potentially make at least some money from lol. Well that, and there are a number of things I’d like to be able to do in my game that I am 99.9% certain would be impossible to mod in to any current ‘moddable’ game, would require being built into the core of the engine from the ground up.